Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain firmware and application software that are either provided by the manufacturers of the electronic devices, by telecommunication carriers, or by third parties. These firmware and application software often contain software bugs. New versions of the firmware and software are periodically released to fix the bugs or to introduce new features, or both.
There is a problem with updating software/firmware in a mobile handset where there is very little free space available in memory to conduct update-related operations. There is need to determine where an update was interrupted in order to resume update activities following an interruption, such as a power failure. It is often difficult to determine where an update was interrupted. Additionally, if an update takes multiple passes, it is not easy to determine which pass to resume update from during a subsequent recovery from failure.
Typically, status information is saved in order to provide information that may be used to recover from activities that are interrupted. However, in FLASH-based electronic device, writing to FLASH requires the steps of erasing the FLASH and writing a whole block of FLASH memory at a time—individual bits of FLASH memory cannot be written. Thus, saving status information for subsequent possible access is an expensive task in terms of the time taken to frequently update status information in FLASH memory.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings appended hereto.